


under the influence

by usingmyoxygen (keithsforeheadtattoo)



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-23
Updated: 2012-06-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 12:12:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keithsforeheadtattoo/pseuds/usingmyoxygen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it's probably love that drives it all, michael thinks, until he wakes up with an incapacitating hangover to a trashed living room reeking of lighter fluid and a post-it (<i>and that's why you always leave a</i>) note on his forearm reading "broke your window sorry" in a familiar scrawl. bluths don't really "do" love, he concludes instead; figures the closest he may ever get is care plus obligation.</p><p>  <b>five gen vignettes; if the bluth kids are getting along, they're probably under the influence of something.</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. acapulco gold

**Author's Note:**

> still can't find the "right" order to put these vignettes in, but ah well.

tobias's improvised toast at their rehearsal dinner is so long that the majority of the wedding party actually gets up and leaves multiple times without him noticing. lindsay herself recognizes this as her first chance in hours for oxygen unpolluted by the smoggy combination of her fiance's rambling self-righteousness and her father's contempt and ducks out almost immediately.

she picks a hotel balcony at random for fresh air and instead finds another ceremony-escapee huddled against the balustrade.

"gob?" she calls after the tuxedoed form; he whips around and hurriedly attempts to stash a conspicuously fuming something in his front pocket.

lindsay is reminded instantly of high school, of the first time she'd caught him smoking out in the family's garage -- a drippingly sardonic "what are you gonna do, tell mom and dad?" followed in the literal same breath with a wide-eyed "please don't tell mom and dad, linds."

"thought it smelled like uncle oscar up here," she comments casually, hiking up the cumbersome skirts of her dress to perch herself on one end of a deck chair. she's kind of honored, inexplicably, when he relaxes and fishes his hand back out of his jacket upon seeing that it's her. 

lindsay hums 'here comes the bride' as she sidles up next to him to pluck the joint from between his fingers, the song a nonverbal reminder of every reason why she, above anyone else there, deserves not to have to finish the day (or tobias's speech -- whichever ends first) sober.

her actual wedding pans out to be every bit the disaster she'd anticipated, but the latter half of the rehearsal dinner, she spends outside under the stars having discussions about the sociopolitical world with someone just as ignorant about it as her, and she has fun, and there's no pressure, and she's happy, and that's the only memory of the entire weekend that she chooses to retain.


	2. grief

michael has a breakdown the day before tracy's funeral and dials lindsay without thinking, leaves her an answering machine of sorries and pleases and ohmygods. she speeds to his house, asks "what happened?"; "i don't know what to do," says michael, and that's a monumental enough event to have made the drive more than worthwhile.

worse yet are the tears, which she realizes in that moment she's never witnessed from him since childhood and is vastly unsure how to handle.

michael's too smart and too shattered for platitudes, so she just says "i'm here", repeats it in a placating murmur because it's the only solid thing she can give him.


	3. seagram's seven crown

drinking with gob is inevitable but problematic; michael's found over the years that it rarely ends well. more specifically, it rarely ends without weepy and torrential daddy issues, something sober michael is always in ready-mode to quench or deflect but drunk michael can't help but be drawn into with an almost magnetized sympathy. when he's intoxicated enough, he falls into a compulsive mode of momming uncontrollably -- something he'd speculated once was a trait embedded in him by his own fermented mother, until said speculation was shut down by the easy realization that no version of lucille had ever mothered much.

he can't really name, then, what nurturing force it is in him that alcohol catalyzes. it's a strong force, whatever it is. strong enough to keep him up at three in the morning listening to slurry tales of their father's many shortcomings; to have him stumblingly attempt (and burn) the grilled cheese that gob fiercely insists is definitely a good idea; to make him sit in the same spot on the couch for hours until his indent is imprinted on the cushions because the mumblingly apologetic, droopy hug and clumsy hair-stroking and aimless humming he'd used in panic to quell an impending wave of fresh tears from his brother had put gob to sleep on michael's shoulder within verse two of his impromptu, invented melody.

it's probably love that drives it all, michael thinks, until he wakes up with an incapacitating hangover to a trashed living room reeking of lighter fluid and a post-it ( _and that's why you always leave a_ ) note on his forearm reading "broke your window sorry" in a familiar scrawl. bluths don't really "do" love, he concludes instead; figures the closest he may ever get is care plus obligation.


	4. fear

it isn't the thunder that wakes him but the plaintive whimpering and desperate rattling of his doorknob, punctuating what should have been the start of his rem sleep cycle. he waits, bleary-eyed, until the ringing crack that follows a fresh burst of lightning produces an unmistakable sob from the other side of the door.

"george oscar?!" comes the sniffly plea, accompanying a new series of frenetic knocks. 

"come in," he offers begrudgingly; lucille had called michael 'so friendly' that morning over breakfast in tones that reeked of 'unlike-some-people' and that had ended george oscar's two-week stint of locking his bedroom door at all times. that had been her goal, he would realize ten years later and leave her a long-winded, berating drunken answering machine message about, but the thirteen-year-old incarnation of the man who would become gob bluth had yet to gain a practical understanding of his parents' manipulative tendencies.

"george oscar, can i sleep in your bed tonight?" buster asks only after he's wriggled completely under the covers, sporting an expression that suggests he's already knocked on three other doors since the beginning of the storm.

george oscar sighs.

 _so friendly_ , he recalls involuntarily. _so friendly_ , he needs to be so bad it burns him. 

"all right," he says, and at first it's still about mom and the hopes that if he treats her sheltered youngest well enough then some positive ( _so friendly_ ) report will make its way back to her ( _and then she'll think he's_ ) but even by the time that he's forgotten that injustice and moved on to being mad about something else, even though by day he's a whirlwind of shoulder-punching i'm-the-oldest, every nighttime thunderstorm for the next five years catapults buster into his room and he never once turns him away.


	5. acapulco gold

lindsay cooks for him. lindsay forgets things, too, and gets fevers every day, and her blood pressure spikes through the roof, but these are not the things that buster notices. he notices, instead, the flaking sandwiches and runny cakes; the driving, 'it's-the-thought-that-counts' brand of gestures she piles on him without warning.

he's afraid, at first, conditioned after so many years of lucille to interpret all kindnesses as the predecessors to something sinister. but lindsay, as it happens, turns out to be harmless.

she cooks for him and gives him a handmade birthday card and invites him to every one of the family band solution's rehearsals. the latter two are tainted, a little -- his real birthday had passed without comment months ago, entirely unaddressed by all of his siblings, and his anxiety around string instruments keeps him away from most things with the word 'band' in them on principle -- but he's touched because he can't recall a time when he and lindsay had ever interacted this much.

he found photographs, once, almost inexplicable in lucille's apartment, and near the top of the stack had been a polaroid of him and lindsay, both blank-looking and staring into the lens from in front of the family's lavish christmas tree, lindsay's cheeks streaked with the pattern of dried tears. he held the photo in both hands, studying it into memory: he'd fallen ill during the same holiday season that lindsay had gotten her first period (something that remained, on the whole, unexplained to him until much later) and they'd both been made instant outliers, excluded from the christmas eve party, left instead with the nanny and matching feelings of unworthiness. lindsay spent hours crying in her room and came downstairs, spite-filled and conspiratorial, only to pose for what their au pair referred to with mistaken optimism as their 'christmas card photo'. 

"that'll show 'em," lindsay sniffled while buster blinked through the camera flash, as though there were any expression in existence so pitiful that she could present her parents with a photo of it and make them sorry enough to turn back time and invite her.

she retreated back up into her room after that, re-emerging later that night once the nanny had fallen asleep in front of her umpteenth andy griffith show rerun.

"they left without us," lindsay sulked, in the unmatched resolve of a preteen girl with nowhere to wear her new red-and-green velvet dress -- and that was the last time they'd ever been an 'us', really; sitting in the flickering television light in a communal pout; he who had never been served a home-cooked meal and she, the owner of countless unopened kitchen playsets.

when the band breaks up for the first time, the change is swift. lindsay stops taking the pills one day and the following morning gives buster's phone calls the same, permanent treatment. he's bothered, but then he's always bothered, and knows how to write off his own feelings better than he knows how to handle them.

he doesn't know what to do, either, when years afterward he walks into the model home's kitchen and is faced with a wooden spoonful of hot ham water and a chorus of jingle bells ringing achingly through some far-off, forgotten ventricle.


End file.
